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Great Divergence

Broadberry et al. — British GDP 1270–1870

The standard modern reconstruction of British (formerly English) real GDP and per-capita income from 1270 to 1870, produced by Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen and published in British Economic Growth 1270–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Extends and refines the long tradition of British national-income historical reconstruction (Deane–Cole, Crafts–Harley, Feinstein) by combining detailed sectoral output reconstructions for agriculture, industry, and services with population estimates from the Cambridge Group’s parish-register work.

The series has reshaped both the Industrial Revolution and Great Divergence debates by extending careful quantitative growth measurement back five centuries before the conventional IR period.

Coverage

Section titled “Coverage”
  • Time: 1270–1870, annual (with some interpolation in earlier centuries).
  • Variables: real GDP, real GDP per capita, sectoral output for agriculture/industry/services, population.
  • Geography: England (1270–1700) and Britain (1700–1870).

Headline findings

Section titled “Headline findings”
  • Per-capita peak after the Black Death. English per-capita income jumped substantially after 1348 as population collapsed but capital stock and land remained — peaking around 1450 at levels not exceeded again until the late 17th century. The “Malthusian” reading is largely vindicated for this period.
  • Centuries-long pre-IR growth. From ~1500, English per-capita income grew slowly but persistently, reaching roughly $2,200 in 1700 and $4,300 in 1820 (in 2011 international dollars).
  • The Industrial Revolution as terminal acceleration. Per-capita growth rates increased from ~0.3% per year (1700–1820) to ~1% per year (1820–1870), consistent with the Crafts gradualism but extending the time horizon over which growth had been accumulating.
  • Sectoral story. Agriculture’s share of output declined from ~50% in 1380 to ~25% in 1820; industry rose from ~25% to ~30% (then sharply higher post-1820); services grew steadily.

What to be skeptical of

Section titled “What to be skeptical of”

  • Pre-1500 numbers rest on assumed price weights and yield ratios. The further back the reconstruction goes, the more it depends on assumptions about agricultural productivity per acre, urbanization rates, and the ratio of grain prices to industrial output. Confidence intervals widen significantly for medieval estimates.

  • The “century-long pre-IR growth” finding is methodologically partly tautological. If you build a national-accounts series from sectoral output reconstructions and the sectoral output series themselves rely on Crafts-tradition assumptions, you can recover the smooth-growth-since-1500 picture without independent confirmation.

  • The book is hard to fault on transparency — methodological choices are explicit and revisitable — but the fact of methodological choice across 600 years of fragmentary data means the series is not a measurement but a defensible reconstruction.

  • Status as a baseline: despite these caveats, the Broadberry et al. series is now the standard reference, replacing the older Deane–Cole and Crafts–Harley series for almost all comparative-economic-history purposes.

Source

Section titled “Source”